It represents an unfortunate tendency in contemporary exhibition practice: asking artists, or interrogating their works, for responses to some event, topic or personality on which the culture at large has fixated.

The last memorable example seen here was "100 Artists See God," a touring exhibition that visited the Contemporary Jewish Museum in 2004. That show had both gravity and humor - like the Dalai Lama - while many of the works in "The Missing Peace" take nothing more seriously than themselves.

Having seen the Dalai Lama up close, as well as through the media telescope, I can confirm that he conducts himself with remarkable modesty and dignity for someone on whom people around the world project myriad notions, from deific ancestry and supernatural powers to perfidious statecraft.

To Buddhists, his embodiment of the doctrine of wisdom and compassion probably matters most. Perhaps everyone else should prize most his transmission - not mere espousal - of relaxation, basic freedom from fear, in every setting where he appears. No other public figure of his prominence does this so well.

We find it here most obviously in documentary passages of Robin Garthwait and Dan Griffin's brief video portrait and in the Dalai Lama's response - reported, like so much else here, in label copy - to Sylvie Fleury's Kirlian photograph of a well-worn pair of his shoes.

Kirlian photography purports to render the afterglow of a person's aura visible. Sure enough, the shoes appear in Fleury's picture with light radiating from their soles and stitches.

Asked to lend the shoes themselves to the exhibition - they appear here, touchingly unradiant, in a vitrine - the Dalai Lama reportedly remarked that since they had been resoled more than once, their aura probably comes from his cobbler.

Does Fleury know that the Buddha's footprints have a prominent place in the iconography? I'd like to think so, but nothing on hand confirms it.

Artworks selected to illuminate themes such as "Impermanence," "The Path to Peace" and "Spirituality and Globalization" cannot - or anyway never seem to - occupy a common plane of high accomplishment.

Some topical shows can stand up under the consequent implication that consistency in the quality of ideas and attention does not matter. But a show centered on Buddhist precepts necessarily sponsors the notion that the uses of our attention and thought do matter.

Most of the works on view that succeed as art fit uncomfortably into the demonstrative program of "The Missing Peace."

In "The Scribe" (2005), Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison present a characteristically strange image in the form of a color photograph that measures more than 3 by 7 feet. It pictures a hand fitted with a makeshift device for drawing with its own blood, as it does on the snow of a wintry landscape.

This piece comes under the rubric of "Unity," for reasons never made clear enough.

Laurie Anderson contributes a very engaging work, "From the Air" (2006), in the form of a performance video of herself and her dog, projected on tiny ceramic figures. It offers the strange sensation of watching theater in miniature.

Her narrative, taken from a performance called "The End of the Moon," concerns seeing her dog undergo a change in awareness of the world, like that of her neighbors who witnessed the World Trade Center's destruction, after vultures nearly made a meal of the terrier.

This piece falls within the "Transformation" section of the show, reasonably enough. Yet Anderson does not need the context provided by the show nearly as much as the show needs her.

Dove Bradshaw's mound of Himalayan salt being slowly eaten away by dripping water fits as easily into the present setting as it does into its endemic context of concept and process art.

But a few other things, besides Anderson's piece, will stay with me long after "The Missing Peace" moves on, notably Seyed Alavi's black-on-yellow comic pictograms. They look like street signs to designate conditions such as being of one mind with someone else, passing unnoticed and being in someone else's thoughts.

The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama: Works in various media by 88 contemporary artists. Through March 16. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. www.ybca.org.

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